Looking for the Best WOW: Understanding the Nurses' Needs

The effective use of nurses' time for providing increasingly safe, efficient, and patient-centered care is a major concern for healthcare managers as well as for nurses themselves. Different solutions have been used aimed at improving those times by providing nurses with mobile and 'on wheels' alternatives for bedside care. Nevertheless, the selection of solutions is still a complicated organizational decision. This paper describes the evaluation of ergonomic characteristics of five local mobile carts for the bedside nursing care at Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires. Cornell University's checklist was used for data collection according to five domains: car handling, work surface and data load, documents and screen reading, storage and dimensions, and energy and cleaning. Considering the scarcity of literature on needs for WOWs assessment, the findings of this paper represent a valuable approach to the requirements of nurses in real work environments and a support for decision-making based on nursing observations.